My other career is as a musician. For years I really regarded my web work as a day job, until one day I realized that I loved it and was pretty good at it. Since, I’ve treated both as careers and it’s been interesting looking at both and how one influences the other in my life.
A lot of being both a musician, and a web developer (even as a lacky employee) is PR. How do you make your voice (or the voice of your employer) heard on the web? Promotion. Lots of promotion. Every little bit of good (and sometimes bad) helps get you attention. I won’t go into the personal brand rant here, but I’m realizing it’s more and more important. But I digress.
One of the things you always want to create is anticipation. Excitement, buzz, whatever. The antithesis is disappointment. A key lesson I learned from Derek Sivers, who is his own amalgamation of “music” and “web 2.0″, is that you should never talk about a product before it’s available. Two main points to take away from this. First, you create excitement that wanes. You need to be able to ride the wave, and don’t you want to benefit from this? Second, if you don’t deliver a better product than you’ve created expectation for, on the day you promise, you disappoint. I think that’s a lot harder to recover from.
What’s that to do with blogging?
I keep reading blog posts apologizing for not blogging, and promising to blog more. People start blogs when they’re excited, or bored or because they think they have to. But situations change. Honestly, most of your users won’t have noticed that you are blogging less, only the die-hard fans. Now you’ve pointed it out, and everyone thinks you’re a slacker. Secondly, are you really going to blog more? If you’ve gotten too busy or lost interest, what’s the chance you will really recover? By creating an expectation, the best you can do is meet it. “Yup, he said he was going to blog more, and he is.” Show, don’t tell.
State of the Blogosphere / 2008, From technorati